The way up was like a ladder, very easy to climb. Then the Trickster took the ladder away and there was no easy path back.

To go and fetch eaglets is to go up to the highest point in the sky.

Not being able to get down in any easy way, and missing wife and family surely is reason for crying, shedding tear-drops.

The Trickster had taken his place. The Trickster was his weird:

"The poet identifies himself with the God of the Waxing Year and his Muse with the Goddess; the rival is his blood-brother, his other self, his weird. All true poetry - true by Housman's practical test [i.e. it makes the hairs of one's chin bristle if one repeats it silently while shaving] - celebrates some incident or scene in this very ancient story [the Theme], and the three main characters are so much a part of our racial inheritance that they not only assert themselves in poetry but recur on occasion of emotional stress in the form of dreams, paranoic visions and delusions.

The weird, or rival, often appears in nightmare as the tall, lean, dark-faced bed-side spectre, or Prince of the Air, who tries to drag the dreamer out through the window, so that he looks back and sees his body still lying rigid in bed; but he takes countless other malevolent or diabolic or serpent-like forms."

"It will be objected that man has as valid a claim to divinity as woman. That is true only in a sense; he is divine not in his single person, but only in his twinhood. As Osiris, the Spirit of the Waxing Year, he is always jealous of his weird, Set, the Spirit of the Waning Year, and vice versa; he cannot be both of them at once except by an intellectual effort that destroys his humanity, and this is the fundamental defect of the Apollonian or Jehovistic cult.

Man is demi-god: he always has either one foot or the other in the grave; woman is divine because she can keep both her feet always in the same place, whether in the sky, in the underworld, or on this earth. Man envies her and tells himself lies about his own completeness, and thereby makes himself miserable; because if he is divine she is not even a demi-goddess - she is a mere nymph and his love for her turns to scorn or hate.

Woman worships the male infant, not the grown man: it is evidence of her deity, of man's dependence on her for life. She is passionately interested in grown men, however, because the love-hate that Osiris and Set feel for each other on her account is a tribute to her divinity. She tries to satisfy both, but can only do so by alternate murder, and man tries to regard this as evidence of her fundamental falsity, not of his own irreconsolable demands on her." (The White Goddess)

Suddenly bursting upon the Trickster from a 'sack of meat', killing him, cutting him to pieces does not make him go away forever.

He will return, half a year later.

There was once an Indian who was married and the father of a boy and a girl. The Trickster, who wanted to appropriate his fine garments and his wife, persuaded him to go and fetch eaglets from the top of a high peak.

The Indian took off his clothing and started to climb up the cliff, which he found quite an easy task, since the way to the nest was like a stairway. But the Trickster commanded that the peak increase in height. He made the sides completely smooth so that the Indian was unable to come back down and remained stranded at the top.

The Trickster did not attempt (as in Salish mythology) to assume the outward appearance of his rival. He related what had happened but said nothing of the part he himself had played, and claimed that the hero, before disappearing, had told him to take care of his wife and children.

The wife consented but it was not long before her new husband started to scold his stepchildren without cause or reason. Such is the feeling with the stepfather or stepmother for children. The woman, who loved her children and was unhappy to see them being ill-treated, decided to divulge the suspicious circumstances in which her husband had disappeared.

Everybody went to the foot of the peak which was strewn with beads; these were the tears shed by the hero who had wept for days and nights. They called upon the wild geese to help: they flew to the top, put the man on their backs and landed him safely. He was at once comforted and cared for; he recovered his health and strength.

He then set off to look for his wife and children; he found them again and gave them food, for his rival had deprived the children of food in the hope that they would quickly die of hunger.

The hero then hid in a meat sack, jumped on the Trickster and killed him. The corpse was cut up and the pieces scattered.

However, the Trickster came back to life. He went away and stopped to rest by a lake, and meditated on death: should death be final or not?

On seeing that a stick, then a buffalo turd, and lastly a piece of pith remained afloat after he had thrown them into the lake, he opted for resurrection. However, when a pebble sank, he reversed his decision. It was better that people should die, he concluded, otherwise the earth would quickly become overpopulated. Since that time, people only live for a certain period and die for ever ..." (The Naked Man)